When you no longer get the Hottest 100

Dom Knight

I used to think Australia Day was the ideal birthday. It's a public holiday, it's usually warm, and there are frequently fireworks which I like to imagine are in my honour. And it arrives just as the summer holidays have wound down, giving you one last hurrah before the serious portion of the year kicks in.

That said, 26 January is never going to be a morally unambiguous day. Tacky jingoism and an uncomfortable history of colonisation tend to complicate a day which, in my view, should largely be about giving me presents. This reached its nadir a few years ago, when the day got hijacked by Big Day Out yobbos wearing their flags as capes like bogan superheroes with the power to fly through the air while making ignorant comments about immigration.

Nowadays, my birthday has become less of an occasion for me to seek even more attention than usual, and more of an uncomfortable reminder of the ageing process. My birthday makes me feel ancient, like the hint of arthritis in my left knee, and my inability to see the point of Snapchat. But this year, being born on the day when Captain Arthur Phillip planted his flag in Sydney Cove and declared that he couldn't see any natives anywhere, so he may as well just claim the whole thing, what, came with an additional complication.

Australia Day is also the day when triple j plays the Hottest 100, of course. In the early years, I used to know most of the songs, and buy the compilation CDs so I could pretend to be a hardcore fan of bands I'd previously considered too cool for me, like Nine Inch Nails and You Am I. I’ve been listening in since the first year when they restricted the countdown to the previous year – I loved the 1993 countdown when Denis Leary's 'Asshole' was number one, because I thought that was just about the funniest song ever. Gimme a break, I was 16.

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This year, the Hottest 100 turned 20 (in its current songs-from-the-last-year format) and I turned 36, and the premiere kiddie/hipster countdown became a source of confusion. Because this was the first year when I had never even heard the number one song, 'Thrift Shop'. Not only that, I hadn't even heard of it, or even of the artists – Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, and the questionably-named Wanz. Yes, even though it was number one on the ARIA chart last year, too.

What’s more, having heard it, I couldn't see why anybody liked it. I still can’t.

There, I made the ultimate fogey comment: kids these days listen to weird music. Why can't they go back to the good old days of people singing over their guitars, like that nice Kurt Cobain fella?

In previous years, I might have looked up Macklemore, Ryan Lewis and even Wanz on the internet so I could pretend to be informed when talking about them. This year, I still haven't bothered – and it hasn’t been a problem, either, since nobody's brought them up in conversation. All I can tell you is that 'Macklemore' sounds like it might be the mansion next door to Downton Abbey.

More damningly still – and I'm going to be honest, even though this is deeply embarrassing – of the 100 songs that made the cut, I only knew 17. And I'd only heard of the *artists* for about a third of the tracks. So thanks, triple j, for making me feel completely antiquated on my birthday.

What was I even doing listening to the Hottest 100, you may ask. After all, I work for one of the ABC’s decidedly non-youth networks. (Which is, I admit, the only reason I’ve heard of a few of the songs – ‘Little Talks’ and ‘I Got Burned’, for instance, which are on our playlist.) Well, I caught quite a bit of it because of an even more age-affirming decision – attending a Hottest 100 party.

Parties are nice, of course, especially on one’s birthday, when you can imagine that they've been thrown in your honour. And I like relaxed house parties in the middle of summer. This one had more than a hundred people at it, and giant speakers in the backyard blaring out triple j. All of which would be well and good, except that nearly everybody in attendance was more than a decade younger than me. I don’t know whether they were Generation Y or Z or even the one below. All I know is that when I started at university, most of them weren’t even in primary school.

I could see the confusion in some of their juvenile faces as they wondered who’d let the old man with the receding hairline in. Was I a neighbour, or perhaps even a parent? The incomprehension was mutual. As I watched them dancing to the music, and splashing about in the pool, I felt even older than 36.

Fortunately, I had a few friends there, a very small number of whom were even my side of thirty. We chatted on the fringe of the seething morass who were dancing to Hottest 100 songs they knew every word of but which I couldn’t place. And I played backyard cricket with muscly guys in singlets who slogged the few deliveries I sent down that weren’t wide, and made me feel like John Howard. It was fun, but ultimately, I didn’t belong.

After a couple of hours, I took my leave of the few of those young scamps whom I knew, and got into the car which I was still sober enough to drive, and drove to a very pleasant dinner party. Everyone there was within a year or two of my age, had been a good friend for more than a decade. Almost all of them, as is practically standard for thirtysomethings of my acquaintance, had children.

After dinner, I asked the table for a moment of silence, and played them ‘Thrift Shop’. None of them had heard it, and none of them understood how it had been voted number one in the Hottest 100. We didn’t even get all the way through it before I switched the stereo back to good old Mix 80s. I sighed in relief, knowing that here, I was among my peers.

I drove home at the sensible hour of 11pm, because even though it was a Saturday night on a long weekend, some of those in attendance were pregnant, and others had to pick their children up from the obliging grandparents who had been minding them. Spending time with those friends made me feel like the other extreme – a relatively free spirit, a person who at least got invited to and was sufficiently childless to attend parties full of groovy twentysomethings, even if they didn’t really fit in at them.

As I drove, I kept listening to triple j, where twentysomething Nina Las Vegas was DJing a Hottest 100 after-party, and I formulated an ingenious plan to make sure that today’s experience was never repeated. If I spent more time listening to triple j, then maybe, just maybe, I’d know more than 17 songs in next year’s Hottest 100.

51 comments

I'm sorry for your loss...of youth. It happened to me once but then I decided I didn't give a toss.

Thrift Shop is a fluff piece with a cool sax hook. It’s not the best song ever but it’s OK. But don’t be so quick to write off Macklemore – his other song of last year ‘Same Love’ is one of the better protest songs of recent times.

Commenter

Tom

Location

Canberra

Date and time

February 01, 2013, 7:16AM

as grandpa simpson once said:

"I used to be with it, but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn't 'it', and what's 'it' seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you... "

Commenter

yossarian

Location

sydney

Date and time

February 01, 2013, 12:25PM

Maybe this year's hottest 100 is just an anomaly.

How can PSY's Gangnam Style with over a billion youtube hits not make the top 100?

Was so cool it was uncool?

Commenter

SmallTalk

Location

Sydney

Date and time

February 01, 2013, 2:21PM

SmallTalk: a good, entertaining video does not a good song make.

Commenter

Chris

Location

Date and time

February 01, 2013, 2:54PM

I've never made the "Kids music these days" comment. That's the moment you become old. I like to give everything a chance on it's merits and a lot of music is a reinvention of what I listened to 20 or 30 years ago. Some I like. Some I don't. But I still listen with an open mind and I have another 10 years on the author. Having said all that, I haven't heard "Thrift Shop" either.

Commenter

David

Location

Fletcher

Date and time

February 01, 2013, 8:25AM

I am sure there's still plenty of good music around these days but most of the stuff I hear on the radio is crap.

JJJ went downhill big time when they started to play too much (c)rap and hip hop (especially the Australian stuff which is terrible).

Commenter

Oldtimer

Location

Date and time

February 01, 2013, 12:36PM

Thanks Dom! I've been having that same experience, with one notable difference- I go to a hottest 100 party every year, and know about the same percentage of songs. Occassionally, I feel old. But, one of the hosts is a couple of years older than me, so I just resign myself to the fact that I'm not old, just comfortable in my Pop tastes (and I'm a couple of years older than you!).

Give Macklemore another listen. I hated it the first couple of times I heard it, now I love to do the 80's headbop to it while driving. And listen to Same Love, as Tom recommended. It's worth it.

Commenter

At Work

Location

Date and time

February 01, 2013, 8:51AM

As a 30-something myself I am thoroughly sick of my peers moaning about "feeling old". Many people I know did exactly what this author did last week and lamented how not getting the Hottest 100 was a sign they were past it. In their 30s. Seriously?

How unbearable will they be when they are actually old, like, say in their 90s? Especially considering they will also be carrying all that guilt about wasting their youth (yes, you are still young in your 30s) complaining about being old.

Commenter

Paul

Location

Date and time

February 01, 2013, 9:02AM

hahahahaha YES!!

+1

Commenter

Miffy

Location

Date and time

February 01, 2013, 10:30AM

Yes but it's a weird time when you're friends are having kids and you're not, but you're 'too old' for the young stuff anymore...

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